The Sleep of Reason Read Online Free PDF Page A

precocious, and she probably the reverse. Yet I had seen my brother, a steady-natured man, but also a possessive father, trying to cope with that precocity. It had taught my brother what fatherhood could mean. Pat’s name wasn’t even Pat. He had been christened after me, but had renamed himself when he was an adolescent. He had rebelled against his first school, and been lucky to survive a second. Martin had managed to get him a place at our Cambridge college: he had given up after a year and gone to London to paint. How he managed to get support out of Martin or anyone else, I didn’t know: but I thought there weren’t many means that he would consider inappropriate. Had he any talent? Here for once Vicky, in the midst of her delight, became half-lucid. “I do hope,” she said, “that he’s as good as he wants to be. Sometimes I worry because he might get bored with it.”
    Then she asked me favours: could they come and see us at our London flat? Could I bring him down to the university some time? She was innocent and shameless: yet anyone would have said that she was one of the stablest of young women, and it would have been true. That was why it was a liberation to abandon herself like this. If he arrived that moment, I was thinking, she would be proud to throw her arms round his neck.
    I asked for another drink. With a shake of her head, coming back to other people’s earth, she poured me a small one.
    “Go slow on that,” she said, tapping the glass, talking to me like a brisk, affectionate and sensible daughter. “You’ll get plenty tonight. Remember, you’ve got to stay up with him (her father) when they’ve all gone.”
    Once more she was businesslike, thinking of her duty. How could I handle him? We were talking tactics, when Arnold Shaw himself entered the room. At first sight, he didn’t look a martinet, much less a puritan. He was short, well-padded, with empurpled cheeks and a curving, malicious, mimic’s mouth. He kissed his daughter, shook my hand, poured himself a lavish Scotch, and told us: “Well, that’s polished off the paper for today.”
    He was an obsessively conscientious administrator. He was also a genuine scholar. He had started life as an inorganic chemist, decided that he wasn’t good enough, and taken up the history of chemistry, out of which he had made a name. In this university the one person who had won international recognition was young Leonard Getliffe. After him, a long way after, in a modest determined fashion, carrying on with his scholarship after he had ‘polished off the paper’, came the Vice-Chancellor himself. It ought to have counted to him for virtue. It might have done, if he could have resisted making observations about his colleagues and his fellow Vice-Chancellors. It wasn’t long since he had told me about one of the latter, with the utmost gratification: “I wouldn’t mind so much that he’s never written a book. But I do think it’s a pity that he’s never read one.”
    That night he moved restlessly about the drawing-room, carrying glasses, stroking his daughter’s hair. The dinner was a routine piece of entertaining, part of the job which he must have gone through many times: but he was nervous. As soon as the first car drove up the drive, he became more nervous and more active. When the Gearys came in, he was pushing drinks into their hands before they could sit down. Denis Geary, who had been a small boy at my old school just before I left it, gave me a good-natured wink; he was the headmaster of a new comprehensive school, nominated to the Court by the local authority, a relaxed and competent man, not easily put out. The Hargraves followed them in, not as relaxed, knowing no one there except through Court meetings and dinners such as this: both of them diffident, descendants of Quaker manufacturers who had made tidy – not excessive – fortunes in the town. Mrs Hargrave, true to her teetotal ancestry, asked timidly for a tomato juice,